Biden Calls Chinese Electric Vehicles a Security Threat
Biden Calls Chinese Electric Vehicles a Security Threat
The president ordered an investigation into auto technology that could track U.S. drivers, part of a broader effort to stop E.V. and other smart-car imports from China.
Biden Calls Chinese Electric Vehicles a Security Threat::The president ordered an investigation into auto technology that could track U.S. drivers, part of a broader effort to stop E.V. and other smart-car imports from China.
their operating systems could send sensitive information to Beijing
Cool. So let's pass legislation that prevents any auto manufacturer from sending sensitive info to anyone unauthorized by the owner of the car. Just because you buy a car "assembled" in the US doesn't mean that your data isn't being harvested, stored improperly, and sold to all bidders.
China is the largest producer of EVs in the world by far (the next country on the list, Germany doesn't even come close). In fact, China produces more EVs than the next 4 top producers combined.
The US is running scared because there is absolutely no way they can compete, unless they severely handicap the competition.
So, instead of free competition in Western markets, we have coddled American companies that are "too big to fail" that will continue producing obsolete technologies. If we haven't already, we'll start to see Boeing's product issues in American cars.
Administration officials noted that American auto manufacturers that sold vehicles to customers in China were essentially forced by Chinese officials to use Chinese software in their vehicles.
I do question the amount of lifting the word essentially is doing in the above snippet, but that does sound like grounds to limit the inverse for Chinese imports
No need to question it. Western auto companies in China aren't independent. They're nearly always joint 50/50 ventures with Chinese auto companies and are under Chinese government regulation. I know for a fact that at least one American car company has the infotainment software for China written in China while all other regions use completely different software, written in NA.
Well, if the US spies on its own citizens can you imagine the shady shit they'd do on Chinese citizens?
I also wonder if restrictions on software are in response to the US restricting access to Huawei tech in allied nations. This shit is not new.
I also wouldn't put it past US officials to inflate something for their own purposes - what if the Chinese requirement is for Chinese language software and it got turned around into Chinese software to serve an agenda.
This is one of the reasons the US is looking to restrict Chinese EV imports. And to be clear, they’re so cheap because the CCP is subsidizing the entire Chinese EV industry, since they want to entirely own the market. But that’s not all.
China, as you may know, has a lot of serious problems around privacy and surveillance. More pointedly: it’s a surveillance state. It’s entirely possible that Chinese EVs could be sending back tons of data to servers in China. That data could be related to users and passengers… but it could also be area surveillance and data gathering (i.e. effectively employing multiple cars in a particular area as a distributed integrated sensor system), because modern cars have a shitload of cameras and microphones in them these days. I would be extremely unsurprised if the CCP was leveraging EV data gathering as an intelligence source. Think about it: they could give/sell near-realtime information to anyone they feel like. The CCP themselves is interested, I’m sure, in what’s going on in Taipei right now. They might sell South Korean data to North Korea. They might sell Ukrainian or Moldovan or Latvian or Finnish data to Russia. Those states might then turn around and use that data to try to destabilize the specified target countries, or even to assist with an invasion.
There are a LOT of reasons why letting the CCP own a vast majority of global EV production is a bad idea.
China is the largest producer of EVs in the world by far (the next country on the list, Germany doesn't even come close). In fact, China produces more EVs than the next 4 top producers combined.
Whenever I see anyone comparing |absolute| values of anything between China and other countries, I just automatically assume they aren't thinking very hard. You realize it's a country of a billion and a half people right?
Tell me you only read the headline
Oh I read the article and found most of it to be rehashed arguments about Huawei.
2019 gmc terrain with 70k miles. Vacuum pump grenaded itself inside the engine. $7k to fix, needs entire new head. Do yourself a favor, buy anything but US.
It is not like all the auto manufacturers are trying to do right now. They see this as a secondary opportunity to generate even more money from their customers and expand their SaaS offerings.
The future is grim.
China and America are not the same but the solution works against all actors: permit users to audit and change the code so dependencies on servers can be removed or replaced with ones of our choice. Without the source code to learn what it's actually doing then all software is potentially a security threat, at best it's just not yet guilty of being malware or having anti-features.
Why should every car owner have to also be a tech nerd or security specialist just to guarantee their car is safe to drive and own? They should be guaranteed safe before they are even sold.
Of course, consumers should have full control over the technology they buy, but it should be safe and secure before it is even sold in the first place. 
The only way to know it is safe is 3rd parties auditing it. The manufacture saying "trust me bro" ain't it and a government audit that doesn't show their work could be bullshit too. A single tech nerd or security specialist is in the same boat as the regular Joe - it's a group effort. Non-techies can contribute in other ways (e.g. reporting bugs).
And I call them the closest anyone in the States will get to an affordable EV. Biden is such a suckup at times. He's just writing a list of reasons for voters to stay home.
There are always many reasons to stay home in any election. Most of them are selfish or deluded
Aside from the security risk, they're probably mitigating the amount of traffic incidents that are bound to occur when the crappily coded cars enter the market
This is the best summary I could come up with:
President Biden took steps on Thursday toward blocking internet-connected Chinese cars and trucks from entry to the American auto market, including electric vehicles, saying they posed risks to national security because their operating systems could send sensitive information to Beijing.
China has rapidly scaled up its production of electric vehicles in recent years, setting it on a collision course with Mr. Biden’s industrial policy efforts that seek to help American automakers dominate that market at home and abroad.
Administration officials are eyeing other steps to further impede imports of Chinese vehicles, which have already surged through European markets, as a result of low prices driven in part by significantly lower labor costs.
The Treasury Department has already proposed rules meant to limit China’s ability to supply materials for cars and trucks that qualify for a $7,500 electric vehicle tax credit included in Mr. Biden’s signature climate bill.
The Commerce Department investigation announced on Thursday grew from a series of conversations that administration officials had with automakers last fall, after the settlement of a United Automobile Workers strike during which Mr. Biden stood with the union and joined a picket line.
Biden aides began to grow concerned about what might happen if the United States did not impose similar restrictions on Chinese software, which administration officials say only a handful of cars in America run on today.
The original article contains 808 words, the summary contains 226 words. Saved 72%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!